jamie writes: "Ever since Digg launched its new site design, it's been plagued with all kinds of trouble, not least of which is that it keeps going down. The problems with the new architecture are so bad that VP of Engineering John Quinn is now gone, we've confirmed with sources close to Digg.... The new version of Digg, v4, is based on a distributed database called Cassandra, which replaced the MySQL database the site ran on before. Cassandra is very advanced — it is supposed to be faster and scale better—but perhaps it is still too experimental. Or maybe it'(TM)s just the way Digg implemented it (Twitter uses Cassandra, although not for its main data store, as does Facebook in places, but it obviously is not as battle-tested as it needs to be). Every engineer at Digg is currently just trying to keep the site up and running. Quinn was the main champion of moving over to Cassandra, say our sources. Now the site is taking a huge hit, at least in the short term, because of that decision and/or how it was implemented, and Quinn is paying for it with his job."

It seems like the only QA or Beta testing they did was for the "site is having problems" logo. In the video, Kevin is talking about having serious issues right up to the launch. Also, isn't it normal practice to have a backout plan if they hit a snafu? Maybe that is the reason for his departure; implementing a buggy solution, and not having any rollback abilities.
Either way, the database move seems logical (MySQL????), but it seems they pushed way too much through at once... Maybe the good news is mos